


Ten more things Danny blames Steve for

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: 10 Things, Character Study, Coda, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Introspection, M/M, Post-Finale, h50 episode 10.22
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:48:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25324921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Obviously, it’s Steve’s fault that he loves Hawaii now. That’s a given. The beaches and the palm trees and the sun and all of the surfing is stuff he never would have tolerated without shouting at least a little, but then Steve came along and made Danny shout at him instead and over the years all that horrible sand has lodged itself in Danny’s heart while he wasn’t looking.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 24
Kudos: 208





	Ten more things Danny blames Steve for

**Author's Note:**

> In 10.22, during their very last talk on the beach, Danny tells Steve that Hawaii is a beautiful place and Steve could clear his head there and Steve says: “Who are you, man? Ten years ago you came out here and you hated this place.” Danny’s reply is this: “I blame you. I blame you for a lot of things.” 
> 
> And then Steve leaves, and such, this rambly meta-ish fic was born. I blame Danny.

**0.** Obviously, it’s Steve’s fault that he loves Hawaii now. That’s a given. The beaches and the palm trees and the sun and all of the surfing is stuff he never would have tolerated in the past without shouting at least a little, but then Steve came along and made Danny shout at him instead and over the years all that horrible sand has lodged itself in Danny’s heart while he wasn’t looking. Steve’s ten year campaign to get Danny to appreciate these islands, that’s why Danny feels at home here now, which he firmly believes never would have happened without one particular McGarrett. Bastard.

**1.** He still, after all these years, blames Steve for getting him shot during their first ever suspect chase as partners. Steve gradually got better at calling for actual backup and occasionally even allowing HPD and SWAT to do their job and provide said requested assistance, but Danny paid for that character growth in blood. He still has the scar to prove it. (There have been a few more bits of flesh pierced by pieces of metal since then, the context of many of which can be debated, but he emphatically does not, it should be noted, blame Steve for the very most recent bullet he took. Danny getting kidnapped and nearly killed was on Daiyu Mei, Wo Fat and Doris, not Steve. Never Steve.)

**2.** Sticking to gunfire for a moment, he actually also blames Steve for the fact that when he hears shots being fired his first instinct is to run _towards_ the sound. It’s not that he absolutely never would have done that before, because he’s a cop and he takes his pledge to serve and protect seriously, but he also used to be a sane person. A decade with Superman, and all of that is out the window. His poor mother would be horrified if she didn’t also harbor a little crush on said Superman, because everyone does, for some inexplicable reason.

**3.** He blames Steve for his new appreciation of his own relatively law-abiding parents. Same goes for his two sisters, who couldn’t be called boring by any stretch of the imagination, but are at the very least not international spies, that much he’s fairly sure of. Mary is a good person, no doubts about that, but she’s also perpetually on the brink of the next disaster. (On Danny’s side, there is Matt and his mistakes, of course, but Danny doesn’t like thinking about those. Matt doesn’t count. Matt, as Danny remembers him, is the little guy that always wanted to play with Danny and his friends and that Danny once had to break up a friendship over because Tommy Marciano would never pass Matt the ball. That’s not something that fits into this equation.)

**4.** He blames Steve for the fact that he doesn’t even blink when Junior drops chunks of butter in his morning coffee. Expanding on that, he also blames Steve for the time he ruined his own beautiful cup of Joe by trying to figure out what the fuss was all about. He had to pour all his hopes and dreams for a good morning down the sink because coffee but greasier is a horrible idea, which he would have known, in hindsight, if Steve hadn’t been convincing enough to make it seem like a good one some-frigging-how. 

**5.** And it doesn’t stop there! There is more food-related disaster Steve introduced into Danny’s life, and worse, into his son’s diet. Danny remembers very clearly that one of the few times he left Charlie with Steve, he instructed Steve to feed Charlie something nutritious for dinner and explicitly forbade them to order pizza or go out for pizza or throw a frozen pizza in the oven, because he knew Steve would have campaigned for pies with pineapple. As beautiful and smart and resilient as Charlie is, he’s also a little boy who is easily led astray and needs to be protected by the adults in his life. What Danny did not and indeed could not foresee was that Steve’s perversities don’t limit themselves to butter in coffee or pineapple in places it should never be, but extend into the pure crime that is squirting perfectly good ketchup all over perfectly good mac and cheese to combine them into something horrid and shameful and decidedly imperfect. There is a list of things that are Danny Williams approved toppings for a classic mac and cheese (breadcrumbs, more cheese, bacon, a different cheese, slices of sausage, a third cheese), and ketchup is emphatically _not_ on that list. He can’t tell Charlie that, though. Charlie was enthused and Danny is not in the habit of policing the details of how his kids eat their dinners as long as they eat them, so now Danny will have to put the ketchup bottle on the table every time he make his nanna’s family recipe for the very best mac, and it is all. Steve’s. Fault.

**6.** It’s also Steve’s fault that his heart jumps every time his phone rings these days. There was a period of time where it did the opposite, sinking for every call, because Rachel has had custom alarms ever since he learned how to set them (the Jaws theme is still, to this day, one of his favorites he ever used) but her lawyers or dear Stanley might not. Every time his phone rang, there was a very real possibility his life was about to be destroyed in new, inventive ways along the same old and tired track of taking Grace away from him. Now, things are the mirror image of those times long past: his phone rings and instead of losing someone he loves, he might get to have them back for a few precious minutes.

**7.** Speaking of confused hearts jumping at the wrong time, he blames Steve for not just being superficially pretty, but under that thin veneer of stupidity that he likes to uphold also genuinely one of the most intelligent, kindest and most mentally resilient men Danny has ever met. And then on top of all of that, he had to go and be moderately witty and smile at Danny’s rants that would scare most people off and completely get Danny down to his core, and it’s rude, plain and simple, because Danny was getting by just fine pretending to himself that he was straight, alright? Alright.

**8.** Really though, he should blame Steve for the fact that he’s in his forties and still single. He could have been married again. He could have had a very nice long-term girlfriend. He probably even could have made things work with Rachel if he had really tried and truly given it his all, but he never did, because there was always that part of him that wasn’t up for sale, because Steve walked in and planted a flag and said something stupid and cool, like _yo, this is mine now_ while making a shaka sign with his hand. Danny’s never been able to really build something new with any woman because there was always Steve, who was always a bigger priority, always right there at the edges of everything and pushing to get to the center, and he didn’t even do it on purpose. It’s almost Danny’s own fault for letting him, but not really, because obviously it’s Steve’s fault for being so goddamn fucking _good_. How’s a guy supposed to look at someone else, anyone else, and not watch them pale in comparison? Even boobs don’t hold a candle to the sun. Or Steve’s infuriatingly perfect abs, for that matter.

**9.** But most of all, far above all of these others, he blames Steve for the fact that he feels happy these days. It makes no sense: he always thought the last time he would feel that way was just after Grace’s birth, when his relationship with Rachel was experiencing a look-we-made-that-together glow that made everything seem golden and alright again for a hot second while he was still in Jersey and kicking ass as a young Detective, just before everything fell apart with a deafening row of crashes. And now, where is he? Grace is nearly grown and has gone off to college to build her own life, he only has Charlie for half weeks because the third time definitely wasn’t the charm when it came to Rachel, he’s still enjoying his job but he can feel in his bones that he’s getting too old for it and the only concrete retirement plan he ever had imploded a year and a half ago. For some reason he wants to spend the rest of his life in Hawaii now even though a part of his soul will forever be in Jersey, and oh, yeah, he’s in love with his best friend who left him behind for some vague mission to find himself. It’s stupid. None of that should make a person feel more baseline content, settled and at home than he maybe ever has in his life. There is only one conclusion to be drawn, and it’s that all of it is once again Steve’s fault for changing Danny into this person who pretends to be angry more than he’s actually angry, and then there’s an additional spoonful of blame to dole out here for the fact that Steve did that by sticking around for ten years and allowing Danny to move in with him and get comfortable, and then he promptly fucked off and left Danny to his own devices to be happy but heartbroken but happy, or at least when the phone rings and he’s cooking dinner in Steve’s kitchen with the hope that he’ll get to serve it to Steve again one day instead of just Junior and Eddie. Fucker.

**10.** Never forget, however, that Steve is also an incorrigible snoop. He’s been gone for just over a month (or, if Danny is in a situation where he doesn’t care to sound chill about it: four weeks, five days, twenty-three hours and something like sixteen minutes, assuming the count starts the last time Danny laid eyes on Steve when he was walking away), when Danny’s phone rings. Obviously his heart jumps, because it’s a disappointingly predictable organ. He picks up, and the conversation goes something like this: “Danny?” / “What’s up?” / “What’s that list in our shared Google drive folder in between all the pictures of Charlie? Things you blame me for?” Now, a layman might assume that Danny would blame himself for accidentally uploading the .txt in which he freely ranted about things on his mind, like his therapist suggested, along with the latest batch of ohana pictures, which were his own idea to keep Steve in the loop as much as possible. Yes, a layman might assume that. A pro however, like Danny, would know to accuse Steve of being nosy, and of violating his privacy by clicking on the file at all, and of being an idiot for accidentally terminating the call and having to call back because he was apparently trying to book a flight to Honolulu while still on the phone _with_ Honolulu.

**1.** Danny will take full credit for bringing Steve back home, though. That’s all on him (as is Steve, coincidentally, the moment he gets back).

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! You are awesome, my parents' dog says hi, and if you feel like leaving a comment that'd be neat, but mostly I hope you have a nice day. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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